>>> 2/3 of these currently selling ones

>> There's only 1 of those 3 been released so far. And even that 1 seems
>> hard to come by judging by the vendor's availability status.

> Hence the: "[...] 2/3 of these currently selling ones [...]"

Hence the:
"There's only 1 of those 3 been released so far. And even that 1 seems hard to come by judging by the vendor's availability status."

Maybe you mean "then" instead of "currently"?

> Acube has stated that they will keep making SAM 460's.

Yes, and shortly after that statement they were available for about 2 days. Hence: "hard to come by".

>> I've yet to hear of any problems in terms of design faults or bad build quality.

> Except for Epsilons broken X1000 you are right.

There's no evidence that this CPU failure was caused by a problem with the board itself. Even Epsilon doesn't think so, which is why he bought another Nemo board.

@Andreas_Wolf

Yes, I meant in the future tense.

ACube will make more still.

I agree, the point is that new still might not be better.

Quote:

For our purposes, yes.
Tabor isn't likely to be available until 2017.
And once available, A-eon isn't likely to introduce something that is too close to that spec or price.

And a T2 board would eat up X5000 market space.
My guess is that we have at least two years or more before A-eon will move to use either CPU.

Quote:

What facts are you basing your assumptions of for such a late release date for the Tabor? From what I have read on forums, it appears to me that some Tabor boards, or full systems, may have been available many months ago, perhaps even as long ago as a year, or more. This might mean that the port of AmigaOS4.1FE could be completed and the Tabor be released for sale much sooner than 2017. I don't have any inside information on how far along the process of porting AmigaOS4.1FE to the Tabor has progressed, so you might be correct, or close with your 2017 release date estimate, but my gut feeling is that it will be ready for release and sale before then.

I think the biggest stumbling block for A-Eon to design and release a new motherboard design using the T2080 CPU is market saturation and lack of sales for the X5000 and Tabor, which would make investing additional money in yet another PPC based motherboard design unwise and financially hurtful for A-Eon. In my opinion, the only way we are going to see additional new motherboard designs, beyond the Tabor and X5000, is dependent on A-Eon's ability to sell over 200 X5000's and at least 400 to 550 (or more) Tabor's, unless Trevor is able to re-negotiate the commitment to purchase 1,000 P1022 CPU's, or resell them to someone else.

I doubt anyone would expect Trevor to purchase 1,000 P1022 CPU's, then design a motherboard for the T2080, if he can't sell enough of those systems or motherboards.

Since Trevor, Matthew and A-Eon/AmigaKit are also involved in so many projects to provide other hardware or software for AmigaOS3.x, AmigaOS4.x, and to a lesser degree, MorphOS and AROS, I sincerely hope that they can succeed in selling the Tabor as well as the X5000, so they can continue investing time and money into those other projects. The Amiga universe would be a much duller place, if A-Eon ever needs to shut down, or scale back on their plans, due to slow, or low sales, of their X5000 and/or Tabor projects. I totally support Trevor's vision of trying to provide more software content, as the most important part of maintaining, or attempting to grow the Amiga community.

With all that said, I do not propose that anyone purchase either the X5000 or Tabor, solely because they want to support A-Eon, if the product they purchase is not useful and satisfying for them to use and enjoy. Buy their products only if they fit your needs and expectations, just like you would for any other company, but I will support them also by speaking up on forums like this one, when anyone posts messages that are unfairly harmful toward A-Eon, Trevor, or Matthew of AmigaKit. (Jim might have been a bit harsh in the choice of the words in some of his messages, or the original title of a different thread, but over all, I know he is an active supporter of A-Eon and Trevor Dickinson, so these comments of mine are not directed at Jim, or what he has written recently.

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The istsybitsy fact of Hyperion publicly admitting that such a port hasn't even started and that the X5000 port still has top priority should really be no reason to not post yet another wall of text with 0.0 common sense.


Giving those well know facts, that it's only 406 days till 2017 and Hyperion's past performance when porting to new HW I'd say 2017 allready is the "fanboyish" estimate for an enduser ready release of Tabor.

Which is one of the major reasons why Tabor is such a stupid idea....


[ Edited by Kronos 21.11.2015 - 11:32 ]

Quote:

It is almost 2016 already, and history shows (back when the collective competence within the OS4 team for writing drivers and low level porting stuff might have been bigger) that it use to take at least one to two years to introduce support for new HW in OS4. The Tabor is using a SoC with AFAIK on-chip controllers that OS4 has no previous support for, so there are no or little re-use of code benefits on the driver side. The competence for this kind of stuff that exists within the OS4 team is busy with the X5000 port, the Tabor port hasn't even started yet (this is public knowledge directly from the source). And when it comes to Tabor, due to its FPU madness, it's not even a matter of a straight port, you would have to incorporate a rather tricky FPU emulation in the OS (tricky at least if you want it to be HW accellerated). The Xorro/Xena of the X1000/X5000 might have been stupid, but it's almost like you wish for that kind of stupidity instead of the SPE-FPU stupidity. At least the Xorro/Xena can be ignored (like the OS4 team has opted to do).

2016 is almost here, and a year has only 365 days. A 2017 estimate is totally realistc IMHO. Could very well end up being 2018.

Quote:


Nitpicking, shall I do just a little bit of nitpicking ........ ;)

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Ah OK, 2016 has 366 days. Well, this changes everything then...

Quote:

Thanks, it was originally my intention to place my estimate of availability at 2018, not 2017 (and I am already being called out on the 2017 estimate).

However, you have pointed out the primary reason for this delay, Hyperion.
Yes the board has been available for about a year, but the porting of OS4 has not even started yet.

This delay is one of the reasons behind my call for a community developed alternative (in addition to the obvious issues with Tabor's P1022 CPU).
We actually have enough time to develop a T10XX solution and port to it.

A T2080 based system would probably require more time, but would place us ahead of the curve.

Look, MorphOS was there at the start of the shift to PPC, why not lead at the finale as well?

Then, when the shift to X64 occurs, we will remain the leading (forward thinking) OS in our community.

> From Amigaworld.net
> BBRV wrote this
> Quote:

Any news?

Quote:

Hasn't work already begun to make MorphOS 64bit capable? I seem to remember something being written about certain parts of MorphOS being upgraded, so that they could take advantage of a shift to a 64bit operating system.

Maybe I am mistaken about what was written, and I can't remember what parts of MorphOS were mentioned in the forum message I can't quite remember.

Quote:

I am not sure that such information should be made public.
It seems likely that any AMD64 porting work would take 64bit addressing into account.

And while 64 bit PPC addressing might HAVE to be the Holy Grail for OS4, if the ISA move occurs for us it doesn't HAVE to be part of our future.

There are a lot of different ways this can be addressed.

In that, we have an advantage.

Best to let the developers experiment as they will without making foolish commitments beforehand (like others).

From past experience, its a sure bet they will choose the best course.

Here's a further curve ball for you.

How about a PCIe X64 board for the X5000 series so it would be compatible with both current and future MorphOS ISAs?

Quote:

so more like this ?
http://bit.ly/1MeZqCY

instead of this ?
http://bit.ly/1NODbuO


or possibly a huskyboard or 96board from 96boards.org

[ Edited by dethknave 15.12.2015 - 09:05 ]

Quote:

But making foolish statements is what I do best!

As for choosing the best course, I have to agree with you, as I have liked and agreed with 90% of all decisions the MorphOS Dev. Team members have made for the past 10+ years, which for the Amiga (and Amiga inspired) community(ies), must be some kind of record. So many bad choices have been made by so many people in our community over the years, it often seems that more bad decisions have been made, than good decisions. Luckily, the MorphOS Dev. Team members have somehow managed to avoid this apparent curse for the most part.

As much as I want Trevor and Matthew to succeed and prosper with their A-Eon company, I must say that I have not agreed with anything close to 90% of their design or production decisions regarding NG Amiga hardware, but I give them all the credit in the world for taking the risk, spending the money, and at least trying to do something, instead of just complaining about the current state of our community, as most other users (and even many developers) do these days.

Quote:

That wasn't really directed at you David.
Rather, it seems like our competition keeps setting goals before they have a clear idea how they will reach them.
I prefer being surprised when something new is introduced.

> From Amigaworld.net
> BBRV wrote this
> Quote:

Has anything come of it?

From Bill and Rachael today:

"Hi Jim, please forgive me for not getting back to you. I guess it was the shock of Freescale actually having absolutely no interest. In fact, they are trying to switch all customers left in PowerPC to ARM. We could license the IP and make our own chip, but we do not have enough money for that. :) FOr the moment, the project has died again. Sorry to share the bad news. Best regards, Raquel and Bill"

So, Aeon's next product (after the X5000) is simply unacceptable.
And Bill appears to have been actively discouraged from pursuing a PPC based board.

Since MorphOS' next move is to X64, and we are not moving to ARM, I guess this may be the close of our relationship with Mr. Buck.

To bad, Bill was always supportive.

So, thank you Mr. Buck for a further consideration.

On to X64...

Quote:

Thanks for sharing this mail. While ppc hadn't that much of a future with Freescale anyway I guess NXP buying freescale has another (amplifying) impact. I think NXP has no particular interest in ppc. It's not "their baby", but just a chip family which has to stand the competition. With ARM it's probably easier to earn money. And NXP bought Freescale not because of the beauty of ppc, but to actually earn money.
But even w/o NXP ppc had no bright future. Which I personally consider somehow a sad fact, but have realized that for quite some time. And hence I repeat it all the time - move MorphOS to x64 ASAP. The ppc has left the building.

Yes, thanks Jim for sharing that info.

I found that Mr. Buck was a very reasonable man to talk to, during the couple of phone conversations I had with him years ago, when he called me to clear up some questions I had, and to apologize for some harsh behavior I had received from one of his staff, in forum posted messages.

I wouldn't rule out the possibility of a port of the x64 version of MorphOS to the ARM architecture some day long after the switch to x64 is finished. It will probably depend on how difficult such a port is and what programming tools are available to make such a port possible, and how many MorphOS users want an ARM version.

I don't know how well loved Android is for ARM devices, or how dominant iOS from Apple will become on ARM devices, but I would guess that as long as the feature gap between MorphOS and iOS, or Android doesn't grow to a huge list of missing features that we can't get working on MorphOS for x64 (and later possibly ARM and if it were ever possible to make an ARM port), then MorphOS for ARM might be appreciated by more users who are not currently, or formerly, from the Amiga or MorphOS communities. That is assuming that MorphOS remains quick, with a tiny footprint after a port to x64 and/or ARM, and that development tools for the future versions of MorphOS make it easy to make or port new software to the new version of MorphOS.

Too many assumptions and "IF's" to expect any of it to become true, but I'll remain an optimist and hope for the best future for MorphOS, our developers, and the community of users.

Actually, it is hardly any news that the future of PowerPC arch is rather dim. That won't change the fact that we will continue to support it.

Quote:

Indeed, thanks for sharing. Pretty much as we already suspected though. PPC is dead, the little life it has left is due to legacy; maintaining embedded stuff that has SW heavily tied to the architecture since long.

Quote:

I suspect that when the Amiga 68k binary compatibility requirement is dropped, all architectural dependencies will be actively dropped and the goal will be to make the OS as HW agnostic as possible. That's what would make most sense IMHO. Ultimately it would be just a matter of selecting a destination platform before compiling/building, be it x64 or ARMv8 or whatever.

Then there are of course other considerations to be made, like to what degree it would make sense to split the platform on more than one HW platform with incompatible binaries. But that's a different issue. And depending on the evolution of the SDK, toolchains etc, this might actually turn out to be a minor issue down the road? Linux can for example be built for most architectures and platforms, and this includes most SW.

I think it's a good thing to target the x64. It has the desktops and laptops we need and want. When it comes to ARM I'd really like to see some more traditional pieces of HW first (proper PCI-e slot(s), latest SATA, USB2/3, etc), i.e. more than just the Raspberry Pi and similar devices. There exists very interesting SoC's in this regard, and more is coming. I'm pretty sure we are about to see ARM motherboards suitable for more traditional desktop use, and I think there will soonish come really good ARM laptops as well. But for now I'm happy with the x64 direction!

I for one am having a blast using my Mac Mini with MorphOS on it. I used to be very eager for the ISA shift, but not anymore. It's just incredible how much you can actually use this old hardware. Of course it would be nice to have more of everything but it's rarely I need it.

I will stick with MorphOS as long as it's possible and fully support the shift when it comes. The only problem is OWB not being updated. This is not much a problem at the moment, but it will probably become one in the future.

If people can still use 20+ year old Amigas, I can use my Mac Mini for another 10+ years too

If I had to choose between an ISA change and better support for the currently supported PPC hardware, I'd prefer the latter. Look at what goes on with OS4, they are constantly preoccupied with supporting new hardware, leaving existing users with almost no support.

> That is assuming that MorphOS remains quick, with a tiny footprint after
> a port to x64 and/or ARM

MorphOS on non-PPC ISA will be slower, relatively speaking, than MorphOS on PPC. That's because it's planned to get memory protection with the ISA switch, which is slower by concept than the current message passing mechanism. Of course, the faster processors will make up for this.

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?forum=3&topic_id=8917&start=25